In addition to what others have said, lithium batteries batteries tend to burn or explode when traumatized. And motors are made out of metal.

Thank you for the thorough explanation. I wish I had mod points.

See above re: huge, complex, and nonlinear.

http://blogs.agu.org/geospace/...

Think of it in terms of energy. Raising the atmosphere's temperature by half a degree is the energy equivalent of detonating about two million nuclear warheads. The heat capacity of the ocean is a thousand times that of the atmosphere, but I'm not sure if the whole ocean has warmed along with the atmosphere. If it has, that would be two billion nuclear warheads. Earth's atmosphere is a huge, complex, nonlinear system. Adding more energy affects different parts of the world in different ways. (That's the nature of averages.) It can get a lot more than half a degree warmer in some places and a lot more than half a degree colder in others.

On top of that, you also get more chaotic weather. Heat is energy. Energy makes things happen.

Slashdot has been around since 1997. The interface is much older than the ability to easily edit comments. Use Preview for proofreading.

Do you have any evidence for that statement? Do you believe that quietly saying "Hey, we need to spend a ton of money and 10-15 years upgrading the internet, but take your time, there's no hurry" would actually prompt businesses to act?

We're changing the internet infrastructure of literally the entire world. Do you really think 10-15 years warning is too much? Think about all the things that have to happen. You have to create and formalize a standard for a new protocol, which takes years. You need to design, debug, and manufacture core routing hardware, which takes years. You have to upgrade all the consumer-level end equipment, which takes many years. None of this is trivial or fast. IPv4 took five years to go from final specification to total adoption, at a time when the total number of internet hosts could be measured in thousands. Today there are almost a billion hosts.

We don't have to guess. We can listen to the actual women involved. An awful lot of them seem to think there's a systemic problem. I don't see any reason to dismiss them.

That you know of. A lot of things can happen in one-on-one conversations or behind closed doors.

You might be hearing coil noise. Perhaps you're better at hearing higher frequencies than other people.

If the summary is accurate, they're promising sixteen times the typical benefit. That's well beyond exaggeration.

The world's population is currently more than 7 billion. The population hasn't been able to fit into 32 bits since about 1978. (Amusingly, that's about when IPv4 was developed.)

For a more thorough and slightly more technical approach to the same subject, check out the Usenet Physics FAQ's article "Is Faster-Than-Light Travel or Communication Possible?". Here's the conclusion:

To begin with, it is rather difficult to define exactly what is really meant by FTL travel and FTL communication. Many things such as shadows can go FTL, but not in a useful way that can carry information.

There are several serious possibilities for real FTL which have been proposed in the scientific literature, but these always come with technical difficulties.

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle tends to stop the use of apparent FTL quantum effects for sending information or matter.

In general relativity there are potential means of FTL travel, but they may be impossible to make work. It is thought highly unlikely that engineers will be building space ships with FTL drives in the foreseeable future, if ever, but it is curious that theoretical physics as we presently understand it seems to leave the door open to the possibility.

FTL travel of the sort science fiction writers would like is almost certainly impossible. For physicists the interesting question is "why is it impossible and what can we learn from that?"

It's not the state getting into your "business", it's your business getting into the state. Marriage predates nation-states by millennia. And as a practical matter, I'm glad I didn't have to get a lawyer and sign a 500-page contract in order to get married, and I'm glad that other people don't need their own lawyer to go over such a contract in order to recognize my marriage.

She's better known for her book Lean In and the associated social movement, which encourages women to actively pursue their careers. Her name has come up on Slashdot before.

Her name is Sheryl. It's fairly well-known. How do you screw this up when the correct name is in the first sentence of the summary?